world compared to me.  I see little and am impressed by nothing; all things and men are assumed to be good, and none of them is given the opportunity of proving itself to be the contrary.  As for the A.M.L.O. at any other port but this one, I remark nothing about him except his princely generosity in letting me have an embarcation card.  He is just one more good fellow in the long series of good fellows who have authorised my move.  I am borne out to sea in a dream—­a dream of England and all that England means to us, be that a wife or a reasonable breakfast at a reasonable hour.  Not until I am on my way back does it occur to me that landing and transport officers have identities, and by that time I have lost all interest in transport and landing and officers and identities and everything else.

At the port of ——­, however, it is very different.  I may arrive on the quay in a dream, but I’m at once out of it when I have caught sight of Greatness sitting in its little hut with the ticket window firmly closed until the arrival of the hour before which he has disposed that it shall not open.  Thoughts of home are gone; I can think of nothing but Him.  When at last I have obtained his gracious, if reluctant, consent to my obeying the instructions I have, and have got on to the boat, I deposit my goods hurriedly, anywhere, and fight for a position by the bulwark nearest the quay, from which I may gaze at his august Excellency for the few remaining hours during which it is given us to linger in or near our well-beloved France.

How came it about, I ask myself, that the Right Man got to be in the Right Place?  It cannot have been merely fortuitous that he was not thrust away into some such obscure job as the command of an Expeditionary Force or the control of the counsels of the Imperial General Staff.  It must have been the deliberate choice of a wise chooser; Major-General Military Landing himself, the SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR on his own, even His MAJESTY in person?  Or was a plebiscite taken through the length and breadth of the British Isles when I was elsewhere, and did Britain, thrilled to the core, clamour for him unanimously?

I watch him keep a perturbed and restless Major from the line waiting while he finishes his light-hearted badinage with a subordinate.  It is altogether magnificent in its sheer sangfroid.  Why is it that such a one is labelled merely A.M.L.O., when he should obviously be the M.L.O.?  He has his subordinate, happily insignificant and obsequiously proud to serve.  Let the subordinate be the a.m.l.o., and let It, Itself, be openly acknowledged to be It, Itself.

By the way, where is his M.L.O.?  Has anybody ever seen him?  I haven’t.  Does he exist?...  Has he been got rid of?

There is a convenient crevice between the quay and the boat with a convenient number of feet of water at the bottom of it.  Is the M.L.O. down there, and is the “A.M.L.O.” brassard but the modesty of true greatness?